Hear Me Roar

When Louisa Kamps concluded that her new governor was trying to stiff the teachers, gut the schools, bully the lawmakers, and screw the poor, she took to the streets and decided to show him just what capitol offense really means

I didn't really think about it, I just went. Listening to the radio on a quick trip out of state, I heard that our new Republican governor, Scott Walker, had announced a surprise plan to strip unionized workers—nurses and teachers, for God's sake—of their collective-bargaining rights. I got back to Madison, ditched my suitcase at home, and flew out the door in my parka to join steel workers, librarians, farmers, off-duty cops, and other deeply pissed-off parents to shout for justice at the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison. While I'd been politically active in my teens and twenties, rallying for women's reproductive and gay rights, in recent years I'd been too consumed with marriage and kids and work to do anything beyond writing a few checks. But what would happen this time around would, I don't think it's too grandiose to say, change my life.

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When Walker ran for office, he regularly promised to bring 250,000 new jobs to Wisconsin. What he didn't mention were his union-busting intentions, nor how deeply in cahoots he is with anti-regulation movement conservatives, like the infamous Kansan billionaire industrialist Koch brothers, David and Charles, who've been among his biggest financial backers. I hadn't voted for Walker, so didn't expect to cheer him at every turn, but the blatant deception infuriated me.

I am the grateful product of Wisconsin public schools, historically strong and still stellar in many districts. My husband and I decided to move back to the state, where we both grew up, several years ago in part so that our children could get the same education—and my kindergartner, Charlie, is already learning to read and plonk away at the glockenspiel. Walker's plan to cut $900 million from the schools next year, while raising income caps on voucher programs to give (in many cases) well-off families who send their kids to private schools a $6,442 state rebate, feels like a direct gut-kick. No matter that charter schools created by free-market enthusiasts in Milwaukee to help disadvantaged children have done no better than the city's public schools, judging by test scores, and have cropped up in some abysmal locations, including a former tire store. Walker now wants taxpayers to foot the bill via vouchers for even more charters—including virtual schools, where quality-control seems nearly impossible. I believe schools ought to lift all kids up. Walker's willingness to choke public schools out of the blind faith that privatization is the answer to all of education's woes seems deeply cynical.

In many ways, the governor's overarching agenda—slamming steep cuts to social programs through the GOP-dominated legislature while doling out corporate subsidies and tax cuts—is a distillation of the sometimes abstract-seeming policies the Republican Party is pushing nationally for 2012. But when your friends are on the brink of losing their health insurance for low and modest earners, and your state-employed neighbors will be forced to move when their pay is cut by up to 10 percent, I can tell you there's nothing abstract about it: The effect is heartbreaking.

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When I first joined the irate protesters at the capitol, I thought Walker actually might crack his window, realize how much opposition there was to his plans, and rethink the $117 million in tax breaks he'd given state businesses at a time when, as he said himself, "everyone must sacrifice." If he really wanted to balance the budget, wouldn't that be the humane, smart-math thing to do?

But marching around the capitol with Charlie on February 26, a cold and snowy Saturday when crowds swelled to more than 70,000, I finally understood, crushingly, that he didn't care what we thought. After my son and I had made almost a full loop chanting "This is what Democracy looks like!," I turned back to look at the bank of people moving up behind us. And the man I happened to home in on—a guy of about 55 with a walrus mustache wearing foggy glasses and a black stocking cap covered with crazy big snowflakes—made my knees buckle. True, he could've been pained right then by a stone in his boot, for all I knew, but his downcast gaze had a look of such overpowering sorrow and confusion that I felt as sad and sputteringly mad as ever in my life. We have a long history of looking out for each other here in Wisconsin, birthplace of the nation's largest public-sector union and the first state to create worker's compensation and unemployment insurance. I turned around and kept moving but had to press my mittens into my eyes to hide my tears.

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I never would've dreamed a year ago I'd be where I am now—hyperconscious of the fine print of local politics, able to rattle off the noble (if for now futile) efforts of my favorite Democratic state legislators. I'm up late at night writing Republicans to register how strongly I oppose cuts to services such as recycling, public transportation, and libraries. I'm volunteering to go door-to-door campaigning for upcoming recall elections. I trek to the capitol at least twice a week to participate in protests that now pop up every time the governor drops a new bomb, or to watch the legislature in session—an agonizing but necessary act of silent witnessing. (Over a brutal couple of weeks recently, the Republicans passed legislation that will make it harder for students and seniors, who typically lean Democratic, to vote, and introduced bills to roll back child labor laws and make it simpler to carry concealed weapons.)

I have Walker to thank for one thing, however—he's taught me exactly what I don't want government to look like, and how fervently I must work as a citizen activist if I want to live in a place that reflects my values. It's so easy to roll along, expecting that politicians in any party, with their smooth talking points, have people's best interests at heart. But what we have in America is ever-widening income inequality. The ruling class—the richest 400 Americans—holds more wealth than half of all American households combined, belying the trickle-down theory that unfettered capitalism benefits everyone. Social mobility, the ability to move above one's parents on the economic ladder, has stalled over the past generation. While we continue to spend billions to develop new war machines even the Pentagon says we don't need (Congress capitulated this spring to military contractors, for example, allowing them to continue building what the Defense Department considered an unnecessary "alternative engine" for certain fighter jets), programs supporting early childhood education, nutrition, and college tuition are on the chopping block. So we're at a crossroads: Is our government in place to protect and encourage the weakest members of our society—as well as the vast middle class treading water or already sinking? Or does it exist to benefit a select few with the deepest pockets and slickest lobbyists?

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My views on the matter have never been more clear. I'd be honored to live in a country gutsy enough to cut military spending and require middle-class citizens like me—and people a whole lot richer—to pay higher taxes to benefit the greater good and reduce the (Republican-born) deficit. Walker and his ilk would love for us newborn revolutionaries to evaporate, I'm sure. But I take heart in another protest chant, with its curiously upbeat rhythm, that I picked up this winter: "We're not going away."